Rise of the Appliances (2010)

Director: Rob Sprackling
Stars: Steven Elliott, John-Paul Macleod and Sue Vincent

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

No, this isn't the latest entry in the increasingly ignorable Terminator franchise, it's a short Welsh horror comedy from Rob Sprackling, writer of such intriguing upcoming titles as Gnomeo and Juliet and Why I Did (Not) Eat My Father. Here the focus is on Daz Thomas, who lives in Cwmbran and is leaving his legacy on videotape because he doesn't have much time left. Last night there was a huge electrical storm and now all his household appliances have apparently come to life and are seeking bloody vengeance on their former masters, namely him and his family. Given that the tagline for this film is 'Dyson with Death!' you can imagine how serious this isn't, but I should point out that the potentially risqué title has nothing to do with sex aids. These are family friendly killing machines, the sort that are so prevalent in our households that we hardly even notice that they're there. They've faded into the background and that makes them pissed.

While this is hardly a serious story, there is a clever subtext in the way that the film is told. Daz's wife Linda won the first attacking appliance, a Breville sandwich press, on The Price is Right and it's that level of consumerism that Sprackling and his co-writer John Smith poke fun at. There's more product placement ('Drink Dr Pepper') in this nine minute short ('Switch to Geico') than any corporate sponsored, brand name drenched eighties film I can remember ('Read Apocalypse Later'), as each succeeding mechanical monster is referred to at least by manufacturer and often by model number or list of features too. It's as if the Thomases were hypnotised by commercials and I wonder what I'd have seen on the screen had I swiped Nada's sunglasses from They Live. This leads to a great moment of irony as when the machines attack, Daz turns to a machine to record his last words for posterity. It's automatic! And it's shiny! With all new features!

As befits what is really a monster movie, there are plenty of monsters to attack and plenty of effects to set up. Nigel Booth's gore effects are solid from the Breville clamping onto Daz's arm on out, though there's one poor digital effect later in the street, as the Thomases realise that it isn't just their Dysons and Nintendos on the march. Somewhere amongst these appliances of death are actors, Steven Elliott leading a capable cast with a good sense of comedic timing and a decent golf swing. He's actually the least experienced actor involved, Sue Vincent having lots of experience on TV and John-Paul Macleod an ambitious lead role in 2000's Taliesin Jones, at the ripe old age of fourteen. All three are decent but they can't steal the film from the CD players and electric toothbrushes. Sprackling shot an award-winning short called Green Monkey in 1998 but this seems to have sparked an intriguing burst of creativity. I'm interested in what's next.

SPAGHETT-1 (2010)

Director: Adam Varney
Stars: Joshua Mikel, Tim Nettles and Mark Marple

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

'I never once thought I'd be in such precarious circumstances,' says Dr Sinclair Tyler, as he gets ready to leap off the roof of a building. He's an effusive sort of character who talks at least a mile a minute, fortunate given that he's going to be tasked with saving the entire United States in a mere seventeen minutes in this post civil war comedy short from Florida State University. We're in Ideal, GA, where Tyler had previously served as apprentice to an eccentric southern scientist called Prof Arthur Couch. When the War of Northern Aggression came along, Tyler had gone north to study while Couch remained in Dixie. Now, a year after the end of the war, Couch has called on his former assistant to help in a matter of life and death. His heart is failing but he's invented a device that will cure it, if only he has Tyler's medical ability to make it happen. It's the SPAGHETT-1, which is as steampunk as you might imagine, given that we're in 1866.

If Joshua Mikel overacts as Tyler, Tim Nettles overacts even more as Couch. He has an eyepatch and a cheesy grin to start with, but he throws himself into the part like he's Billy Bob Thornton on speed. It's not that this pair can't act, it's just that they're acting up an hour's worth of material in a mere quarter of that and they don't have time to slow down and add finesse. They're both great fun to watch, even before we discover what SPAGHETT-1 stands for and what Couch is really planning to do with it. Mark Marple is just as fun as the object of his nefarious plans, a decorated yankee officer called Gen Joshua Chamberlain. It's obvious that all three had a ball making this short and the enthusiasm rubs off on us. It's technically accomplished, the only flaws being tied to the sheer insanity of the whole piece. Bizarrely though that sheer insanity may just be the greatest success of the film too, that and the fact that we're long overdue for a good steampunk riot.

Contact (2009)

Director: Anders Øvergaard
Stars: Ferdinand Falsen Hiis and Lotte Sandbu

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

The sky is clear and Martin is out in the Norwegian forest looking for aliens. It has to be a pretty lonely existence for a young man, even more than your average trainspotter given that at least those guys have trains to look at. What are the odds that Martin's going to see a bunch of aliens? Well, in a science fiction short called Contact, he's going to have a pretty good chance and it turns out to be a well shot, well written little film. It doesn't have a huge amount to say in the twenty minutes it has to run but it says it well, being not just a science fiction story about aliens but also a drama about humans, the other one being a young lady by the name of Lene. Aiming for Jonas's party, she ends up at Martin's tent, lost in the forest. They know each other at first sight and he quickly hides all his notes and drawings before she sees them. She still knows why he's there though, even though she hasn't seen him for four years, so it's hardly a new obsession.

Naturally this is the moment that a ball of light chooses to pass overhead and find its way into an old abandoned house in the woods. What follows is cleverly done, with admirable subtlety given to the story, the acting and the camerawork, but best of all is the lighting which highlights just how well this is shot, given that it mostly unfolds inside a building without the benefit of much light. If there's one thing that identifies an amateur film over anything else, it's scenes shot in low light. They seem to be the hardest thing for inexperienced filmmakers to get right and so such scenes usually end up muddy, too dark or with that annoying grey static tone everywhere. While part of it is inevitably due to the technology used, many amateurs not having access to the Red One that Anders Øvergaard had to play with here, most of it is filmmakers not knowing their limitations. It's obvious that Øvergaard is well past such limitations because this film looks great.

He's had plenty of practice given that the film bug bit him when he borrowed his dad's camcorder at the age of twelve and he hasn't looked back since. For this film, he didn't just write and direct, he also edited the film, designed the sound and created the special effects. While actors Ferdinand Falsen Hiis and Lotte Sandbu successfully avoid stereotypes with their performances, it's entirely Øvergaard's picture and he makes the most of his dream of making a science fiction movie. To be honest, it isn't as a science fiction (or at least a sci-fi) movie that it succeeds for me, as the simple story is an Androcles and the Lion parable that tells more about the youngsters than the aliens. It's the style of the film that succeeded for me, that lighting superbly helping to build suspense by revealing the film's secrets only during camera flashes or by illuminated alien eyes. Contact, or Kontakt in the original Norwegian, is impressive and I hope Øvergaard returns to the genre.

Alien Probe: The Musical! (2009)

Director: Mark Copley
Stars: Brian McClure and Carmen Vreeman

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

With a title like Alien Probe: The Musical!, the question really isn't what happens, it's how bad it's going to get. Well it's not as outrageous as you might expect, especially if, like me, you'd seen Cupcake: A Zombie Lesbian Musical the previous week. These musical shorts with suggestive titles are everywhere nowadays but this may be the least deliberately offensive of the bunch. This time the title is acutely misleading because this one is a musical that you could watch with your kids or your parents. In fact you could watch it with your parents' parents, because the punchline works perfectly well across generations. There are three songs, one from Neil A, an alien who parks his flying saucer on our planet and morphs from a bunch of bubbles into a human being, and two from Leslie, who explains that she's a Barbie still looking for a Ken, but only ends up with idiots. We witness the end of three dates, with Rene, Schecky and Darren, and none of them end well.

The last song is the only one that's suggestive, as we discover that this Barbie is something of a slut, and it's fun trying to work out which planets she's going to rhyme with next. 'If you're from Saturn, I'll be your slattern,' is about as rude as it gets, though you know which one she's going to end up on without even a hint. Brian McClure and Carmen Vreeman have decent, clear voices and the sound is good enough for us to understand everything. The effects are OK and the whole thing breezes along without a hitch, courtesy of writer/director Mark Copley. None of these names seem to have done much or anything else, so their work here is admirable. While some would always miss the alien battery operated machinery that the title might suggest, this is an inoffensive little gem. The only downside is that it perhaps relies too much on the punchline to be worthy of too many repeated viewings. At least it's a great punchline.

Peeping Tom (2010)

Director: Joe Russo
Stars: Dean Veglia, Eva Hamilton and Tyler Janes

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

Opening a film with a scantily clad female butt swaying away from the camera and a guy trying to be David Beckham following her into the bedroom is a pretty good way to grab our attention. The answerphone soon tells us that this is Tom and Alexa's house, but while this is Alexa that isn't Tom. We can be sure of that because Tom is the one ringing her, with the news that he's just round the corner and he'll be there in a minute. By the time he arrives, it doesn't take much imagination to work out what's going on at the end of the trail of discarded clothes, so he... well, this short film runs a mere four minutes so I can't really say anything more without spoiling the story and you'll just have to go watch it yourself. As with all shorts this short, there's only a single punchline but it's a good payoff to the neatly built suspense. Someone should write a pop song around the story and turn it into a music video, but only if that punchline stays intact.

Tom is Dean Veglia, who I last saw in an IFP Phoenix 48 hour film called Finger Food. When I first saw Peeping Tom, I wondered if it could have been a 48 hour film too, given that it's so short and has so few scenes, but it turns out that it was shot in a single day for a measly thousand bucks, chicken feed in movie money. It's quick work too so, as the technical quality is easily professional grade, kudos is very much due to the filmmakers. What's more, they had the sheer bad luck to pick the one day this century that it rained in Phoenix to shoot the thing, thus requiring 18 hours of colour correction to fix. Veglia's fellow actors are less experienced than he is: Tyler Janes has no other credits at IMDb and Eva Hamilton only has a couple. For experience we need to look behind the camera, at a slew of seven producers. One building his filmography is writer/producer/director Joe Russo. He directed Finger Food (and almost everything else Dean Veglia has been in) and he backed up Brian Pulido on The Graves. Here's hoping for a longer picture at next year's festival.

Cupcake: A Zombie Lesbian Musical (2010)

Director: Rebecca Thomson
Stars: Anna Kidd, Rose Mastroianni, Helen Edwards and Pip Tyrrell

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

While the news reporter tells us about the inevitable corpses rising from the grave, Agnes just carries on baking. She looks like a nice old white haired granny who wouldn't hurt a fly, but she can take care of the vast undead hordes fine, with a pitchfork no less, all while chatting away with Mauva, her similarly elderly neighbour. They don't have a problem with the living dead, just the lesbians living next door. And here we break into song for, as the title suggests, this is a musical, but not just any musical. These songs are the sort of songs that could only be more glorious if you put the soundtrack on an iPod and they popped up on shuffle in the car while you're giving the vicar a lift. These old ladies remain all sweetness and light as they sing Zombies and Lesbians with its chorus of 'we'd rather have zombies than lezzos next door.' Rebecca Thomson wrote the lyrics to music by Heath Brown, who also scored El Monstro del Mar! and Dish Communication.

The lezzos being sung about are Cupcake and Dayna and they're a happy couple who sing songs themselves, joyous numbers with lyrics like 'no penis will ever come between us'. Unfortunately things go south just as they're about to get down and dirty and, given that the next song is called My Girlfriend Ate My Pussy - Literally!, it doesn't take a whole heck of a lot of guesswork to realise quite how. To say this is original is something of an understatement, even in a world where every other short genre film seems to be a musical with some sort of classic horror monster in it. There is a Repo! The Genetic Opera vibe, especially as Dayna tries to turn into Alexa Vega at one point, but there's not much else to reference. How many times have you seen a zombie slain with a vibrator shaped like a corn cob? The most surprising thing is that it doesn't seem to do a lot of good, but that just means he can carry on regardless for the rest of the short which is even better.

The dialogue is just as joyous as the song lyrics, the last one being a drag queen zombie number called Zombie Pride with its rousing theme of 'we're zombie, lezzo and proud'. It's spread liberally around the cast so everyone gets a shot. 'Come and eat me, baby,' invites Dayna from behind a blindfold, not realising that it might be taken literally. That may have been a punchline in half the slasher movies the eighties churned out but I can't recall ever seeing a picture actually delivering the goods before. 'One down and one to go,' says Agnes, when the number of living local lezzos is halved. 'Let's a have a barbecue to celebrate.' Once Dayna is zombiefied too, she's as happy as a bearded clam. 'I don't like zombies at all,' she says, 'but at least they've cleaned up the street.' I wish I'd been on that street while they filmed. If there's anything better than watching a musical about zombie lesbians, it's surely filming a musical about zombie lesbians. It must have been a riot.

Beep (2010)

Director: Nicholas Militello
Stars: Matthew O'Brien, Ty Hoodekoff and Nicholas Militello

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

An unnamed traveller arrives in town by plane and finds his way to a hotel. He ought to know what's to come given that he's played by Matthew O'Brien, who also wrote the script, but it seems to end up as a surprise anyway. His plane was late, his girlfriend talks to him on the phone and he has to be up again in three hours. Yet he's woken up by the beep of a smoke detector reporting on its lack of battery charge and when he follows the sound to investigate, we discover that he's never seen an episode of Dexter in his life. Trying to flesh out a full story in a mere six minutes is a challenging task, especially when you add in both opening and closing credits, but O'Brien does a fair job and director Nicholas Militello, who keeps the juiciest part for himself, brings it neatly to the screen. As you might expect for a six minute short, this is a one trick pony, but it's a decent trick, though we do wonder about the logistics of the whole affair.

Ashes (2010)

Director: Elias Matar
Star: Brian Krause

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

A young Spanish boy called Jesus touches a stranded jellyfish on a beach and ends up in hospital. Fortunately when he's dropped anonymously inside the door, Dr Andrew Stanton is right there to take a look. He appears to be a pretty good doctor: he's played by Brian Krause from Charmed and he's dedicated enough to his work that he doesn't get home until long after his wife and daughter have gone to sleep. Even then his mind won't let him join them so he just grabs a coffee and goes back to work. He might as well sleep at the hospital too. It isn't just patients though; he's working on a cure for AIDS and apparently doing pretty well at it, enough so that a seemingly very able and very realistic colleague mentions a Nobel Prize in his future. His mistake is to grant young Jesus a fighting chance. 'It's not your fault,' he tells this minor, whose family has not yet been identified, as he injects him with an experimental AIDS vaccine to boost his immune system.

We know something is wrong when Jesus goes into almost immediate shock. We know something is really wrong when he bites Dr Stanton, hard enough to break the skin through his lab coat. Never mind that there's a limited supply of vaccine that's earmarked for Steven Dupree, his sole test subject, so he has to start skipping treatments, there's just no way this isn't going to come back to bite him later, pun well and truly intended. It fades into the background for a little while first though, so we can watch some normal stuff, like Andrew and Nicole Stanton dealing with a marriage that isn't being nurtured. Even their daughter Islay asks him if her mother is a trophy wife as he rarely spends time at home and they never talk about the same things. She's a sharp cookie but there are plenty of sharp cookies around Dr Stanton. None of them help though, as Jesus dies that night and he simultaneously starts seeing things. Here's where it all begins.

As a story this is a slow burner. There's a great deal of attention given to setup and background, much of which seems to have nothing to do with anything, but it gradually starts to focus. We realise that it's all tightening in like a spiral until Stanton is about to be forced into making a real bitch of a choice: die or infect yourself with AIDS. AIDS would be the cure. It's such a peach that I expected it to be the spark to the story by Edward E Romer and director Elias Matar but it's promptly ignored, which is rather surprising and the only reason I point it out. In fact compared to this choice, all the little subplots about corrupt hospital officialdom and conspiracy theories about AIDS really don't amount to anything. What matters is that this is a zombie movie that ignores the brain munching and concentrates on the origin story, building slowly but surely with brutal honesty and a willingness to make tough decisions of the sort that zombie movies never make.

It's refreshing to see a zombie movie that ends with the apocalypse and doesn't rely on special effects, the closest we get to that here being sharp editing and a tendency to play with the focus. Mostly it's told through story and good acting. Brian Krause is decent as the driven doctor but his sidekicks are even better: Julia Parker as his long suffering nurse, Hana, and Kadeem Hardison as his long suffering lab assistant, Matthew. I can't really complain about a script that manages to mention both Cthulhu and the Darwin Awards, not to mention a 'post apocalyptic erector set', but as good as some of it was, there was also some wasted opportunity. For most of the second half of the picture I was loving how much of it was right, but when it finished I still had questions, less about why they did it that way and more about why they didn't elaborate on some of the more twisted parts. I know that the choice they didn't follow through on is what will stick with me most.

Recollection (2010)

Director: Federico D'Alessandro
Stars: Chadd Stoops, Gina Scoles and Robbie Daymond

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

Waking up with bloody head wounds is never a good thing, but when you find yourself in a freshly dug grave with no recollection of who you are or how you got there, you know you're in trouble. Our John Doe isn't in a field in the middle of nowhere, he's in some sort of back yard surrounded by hints of danger: a bloody table here, a man with an axe over there, a collection of freaky doll parts and children's books inside the first door he finds. There's a woman there too, tied up and with her eyes removed. There are sounds of babies and cool old time Decca blues playing on a turntable. It's a sad state of affairs when the cost of licensing music has forced filmmakers to look far back in time to music that ends far more enjoyable anyway. Can our John Doe make it out alive and in one piece? Can he save the various people chained up in various stages of torture? What haven't we seen yet? Writers Christopher Ryan Yeazel and Federico D'Alessandro keep us guessing.

Chadd Stoops has a Mel Gibson thing going for him as the John Doe who serves as our focus but he moves more like Jonathan Pryce. Gina Scoles finds herself playing a character who has to spend the entire film with her eyes carved out. Robbie Daymond is a sinister shadow. For a while it seems like there's much more here than these mostly silent actors can cram into the slight fifteen minute running time. We can't help but think of the clock ticking and wonder how they're going to wrap it up, but as the suspense builds and we despair for any believable resolution, the filmmakers nail us with a peach of a finish. It's a gruesome film, but unlike most gruesome horror shorts, it aims more for suspense than gore effects and the fact that it ends up with both is a bonus, D'Alessandro's direction and Daniel Ainsworth's cinematography solid partners. D'Alessandro has a string of major Hollywood movies under his belt as a storyboard artist but this is a promising debut for him as an indie filmmaker.

Everything's Eventual (2009)

Director: J P Scott
Stars: Michael Flores, Joe Jones, Cavin Gray Schneider and Shane Dean

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

Everything's Eventual is a 'dollar baby', an intriguing concept that I hadn't heard about before. It seems that Stephen King allows student filmmakers to adapt his short stories for the screen for a single dollar. They can't be released commercially and King retains the rights, but it gives amateur filmmakers serious material to work with. I'm not surprised that they're leaping at this proposition. Arizona director J P Scott spent $45,000 making this, his debut feature, and only $1 was to obtain the permission to use the story. The sound isn't perfect and some scenes are a little dark, but it's capably done and it's a great way to start out. Frank Darabont started out with a dollar baby called The Woman in the Room in 1983. Seven years later he was working in TV, four more and he made what is currently the top film on the IMDb Top 250, The Shawshank Redemption. Through loyalty or something like it, he stayed with King for The Green Mile and The Mist. Dollar babies seem to work.

This one is about Dinky Earnshaw, a young man with special powers. We see him as a ten year old drawing symbols on a window and making flies die. Later it's drawing symbols outside a yard with a big dog in it and eventually drawing symbols in a letter to a bully called Skipper, a colleague at work who beats him up. Quite what happens to the dog and Skipper we don't know to begin with, but it can't be good. It's enough to bring him to the attention of Mr Sharpton, who rings him up out of the blue with a job offer. Sharpton works for a company called TransCorp and describes himself as King Arthur collecting knights. He calls Dinky a trans, someone with special powers, a knight he needs because their goal is to get rid of all the Skippers in the world. He knows he's hired when he heads up to the sky in a private jet, sipping champagne and preparing to join the mile high club. He's very hired. As he repeats to us as he explains his story, he has it pretty good.

It's a strange life, exercising his very particular power to cause people to kill themselves by e-mail using special TransCorp software without anything being up front and personal. Everything is at a distance here, not just his ability but his fringe benefits too. He gets a free house in Columbia City, a free car, free everything. Anything he writes on Dinky's day board is waiting for him when he gets home, from an apple pie to an Henri Rousseau painting. As long as he ends the week broke everything carries on. The turning point of the film is when it ceases to be at a distance, when the work he so blindly does for all that free stuff comes home to him. When he opens his eyes to see just what he's doing, the questions begin. One of Columbia City's own has committed suicide: Dr Andrew Neff, a scientist at the forefront of AIDS research, hardly one of the Skippers of the world. With the questions comes the danger, and we wonder about what other powers are out there.

I haven't read King's story, but this is apparently a pretty close adaptation of the title piece from his Everything's Eventual collection. It's an intriguing little critter but, except for the unashamed teaser of an opening, it unfolds chronologically and inevitably which highlights that, somewhat surprisingly, the source material is the low point. Scott does a good job with what he has, letting the plot unfold naturally without ever feeling forced and certainly making us feel like he had a lot more than $45,000 behind him. His actors are capable, Michael Flores and Joe Jones reminding of Wil Wheaton and Liam Neeson respectively as Dinky and his boss. A couple of actors from Deadfall Trail are notable, Cavin Gray and Shane Dean, but they get small parts with little to do. Dean, who plays Skipper, is always fun to watch, and he's acted for a wide range of local filmmakers, many of whom are graduates of the film program at Arizona State University.

Scott is the latest welcome addition to that list, having reenrolled when that program began, and only time can tell whether he can live up to the obvious Frank Darabont career path comparison. That's a heck of a trail he blazed and one that surely can't be easy to follow but the concept of the dollar baby seems to give small time filmmakers a real chance to attempt it and become big time filmmakers. If only there was a way to see the things outside of screenings at film festivals. There's a solid argument to build that circulating material like this is precisely what the internet is for, but I haven't gone searching yet, for The Woman in the Room or others. Interestingly, the Everything's Eventual website suggests that this dollar baby almost became the first to break on a wider basis, as Stephen King apparently liked the movie and tried to help it gain a theatrical release. In the end that fell through, but it does suggest possibilities for the future.